NGS Central Service Outtage

RAL Status: Site Outtage Update 14/08/09 @ 15:00

The NGS would like to apologise for loss of central NGS services over recent days.

The fault with the Aircon at STFC RAL that caused loss of the entire main machine room at 00:00 on 12/08/09 is now believed to be fixed, though a continued period of testing and confidence building will mean that the machine room remains at risk until early next week. A number of NGS central services have now been resumed by moving key services to a seperate UPS protected machine room.Remaining services that depend on the main machine room will be restarted possibly Monday next week. Further updates will follow.
The current problems at RAL also affect the GridPP Tier-1 service. Further, more detailed, information on the current machine room status can be found at http://www.gridpp.ac.uk or on the GridPP Wiki at http://planet.gridpp.ac.uk.

Services UP:
UK CA - Fully operational, Signing has resumed
NGS Website and Wiki - Fully Operational
Helpdesk - support@grid-support.ac.uk
BDII Services (both ngsinfo and ngi-info)
MyProxy (myproxy.ngs.ac.uk)
UDDI (uddi.ngs.rl.ac.uk)
Ganglia (ganglia.ngs.rl.ac.uk)

All of the following services at STFC RAL remain DOWN:
RAL Compute and database services (All Oracle hosted services) - estimated for Monday 17/08/09 onwards
NGS Portal (portal.ngs.ac.uk)
INCA Monitoring
RMCS
SRB (MCat and RAL Vault) - n.b. this affects access to SRB vaults at all NGS sites
UAS - User accounting portal and new account registration. Note: Existing accounts will remain active and usage records updated once the UAS is re-instated. Users without current access to a particular NGS site should contact the NGS helpdesk.

*** Users who have submitted new applications in the last 3 days and who need urgent access to NGS resources should contact the helpdesk. We can manually create accounts in the NGS VO server. NGS VOMS services at Manchester are not affected by the RAL outtage.***

*** Please note: Any services not mentioned in the above list, those operated by Partner and Affiliate sites are NOT affected by the STFC RAL outtages. ***

Condor workshop open for registration

Our colleagues at the Advanced Research Computing Division (ARCCA - no I 'm not sure how they got that acronym either...) have announced a Condor Workshop at Cardiff University on the 16th September 2009.

The target audience for this event is both administrators (and potential administrators) and end users of Condor with the event split into two parts. The morning session will explore best practices of service provision and future developments. The afternoon session will showcase the research that Condor is enabling.

Registration for the workshop is now open with registration available from the event website.

NGS Innovation Forum '09 - registration open!

The registration for the second annual NGS Innovation Forum is now open! It will be held on the 21st - 22nd of October at The Magic Circle Headquarters in London - a stones throw away from Euston train station.

The event is held over 2 days with the first day primarily aimed at NGS users or potential users. There will be presentations on what the NGS is, how to run a job on the NGS and user success stories as well as break out groups on a variety of topics and research areas in order to gather feedback and input from the community.

The second day is aimed more at IT service providers and will feature presentations on what it means for an institution to join the NGS, what the NGS offers, how the NGS can help with outreach and dissemination and cloud technology amongst others.

The event is free to attend and delegates are welcome to register for one or both days. Further information and a link to the registration site can be found on the event page on the NGS website.

A heads up for our Humanities and Arts users!

The Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts 2009 (DRHA) will take place at Queens University Belfast on the 7th – 9th September and registration is now open.

As well as the conference there are several pre-conference workshops on topics such as GIS applications for Arts and Humanities and visualisation. More information on the workshops is available on the website where you can also find the link for registration.

Summer = summer school time

There have been a couple of announcements of upcoming summer schools recently. It might be cold and rainy (well it is here!) but apparently it's summer so it's time to hone up on your grid computing skills.

A reminder that the ADSSS organised by the NGS and NeSC is taking place on the 7th - 11th of September at Coseners House at Abingdon. The school is aimed at people who are involved in supporting researchers who wish to use NGS resources etc. Full details of the school can be found on its website.

The second school announcement is for the GridKa School 2009 which takes place on the 31st Aug - 4th Sept near Karlsruhe, Germany. The GridKa School offers a broad range of topics, which are chosen from the realm of these projects and beyond, aimed at beginners, experienced users and grid administrators from science and industry. Again full details of the school can be found on their website.

5th IEEE e-Science conference - paper deadline extension!

The 5th International Conference on e-Science has extended their paper deadline until the 7th of August (next Friday) so if you were thinking about submitting a paper and didn’t quite get round to it then there is still time!

The conference will be held in the same week as the UK e-science All Hands Meeting so Oxford will be a great place to be from the 7th – 11th of December.

Papers are invited on a wide range of e-science topics including Arts, Humanities and e-Social Science; Bioinformatics and Health; Physical Sciences and Engineering; Climate and Earth Sciences; Research Tools, Workflow and Systems; Digital Repositories and Data Management and e-Science Practice and Education. Anything goes really!

The proceedings are also expected to be published by the IEEE CS Press, USA and will be made available online through the IEEE Digital Library.

See the conference website for more info.

The NGS helps to forecast crime rates!

NGS user Nick Malleson at the University of Leeds recently had his research featured in Scientific Computing World which has a readership of over 96,000 worldwide!

Nick is using the NGS to forecast crime rates in the city of Leeds by carrying out sophisticated modelling of possible crime scenarios that would be impossible to perform on a desk top PC.

Nick explained “This is where the NGS was essential for the project to be feasible. Without access to NGS resources, the project would not have been able to continue. I can now achieve hundreds of results in a few days where I would have previously only produced one”.

If you would like to read the article on Nick’s research and how the NGS was able to help, follow this link to the article on the Scientific Computing World website.

The NGS Liaison Officer, Gillian Sinclair, often receives enquiries from editors looking for interesting and accessible researcher using grid computing and it's great publicity for the researcher and the NGS when we can match them up!

If you'd like to make sure your research stands out then make sure your use case in your NGS application is up to date and accurate with lots of keywords as this is the main source of our information when looking for specific research.